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Adaptive Collaborative Management
(see also ACM Website)
Local People, Devolution and Adaptive Collaborative Management of Forests has been a major, long term CIFOR program that conducted participatory action research in 11 countries. It focused on collaboration among stakeholders, on social learning, and on empowerment of community people. Its goals were to improve human well and environmental well being.
Project rationale:
Growing out of two previous projects, ACM has been designed to bring about the conditions in forests and communities that had been identified in previous work on sustainability (a C&I project, under Ravi Prabhu) and on devolution and naturally occurring adaptation in communities (under Eva Wollenberg). ACM has been based on the perception that local people’s capabilities were being seriously under-estimated; and that they themselves would ultimately have to be involved in an adaptive process that recognized the interconnections and feedbacks among parts of forest and human systems if improvements in human and environmental well being were to be realized.
Project data:
The project began in 1999, funded by a variety of donors including the EU, Asian Development Bank, USAID, DFID, SDC, and CIFOR itself. Activities were undertaken in Brazil, Bolivia, Cameroon, Ghana, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, Madagascar, Malawi, Nepal, Philippines, and Zimbabwe. Project activities continue, however, since 2002, there has been a decentralization of activities, since different “next steps” make sense in different locales; and CIFOR underwent a structural change. The group continues to maintain interaction through shared publication, email and the quarterly newsletter, ACM News (renamed Forests, People and Governance in March 2005). Partners, numbering nearly 100, included universities, NGOs, government agencies, projects, and private industry. The CIFOR team has been initially led by Carol J. Pierce Colfer, and later by Ravi Prabhu. There has been a core group in Bogor, Indonesia, with each country also having a team.
Methods or approach:
A central method in the ACM approach is participatory action research, a long term method involving iterative cycles of problem identification, planning, implementation, monitoring, and reflection, in collaboration with local community members (whether the whole community or specific user groups or other sub-groups). ACM’s interdisciplinary teams have made significant efforts to address equity concerns, both within communities and between communities and other actors. Complementary studies have been conducted, as specific information gaps emerged.
Expected or actual outputs, products, major events etc:
This long lasting program has had many events. On each site, workshops are held, composed of both single and multiple stakeholders. In some cases regional workshops have been held, to bring together lessons from the various countries (e.g., the Asian teams met in Bangkok in 2000, with the donor, Asian Development Bank; the African and South American teams, respectively, met several times to compare their findings; etc.). Team members have contributed to training on ACM and PAR (e.g., at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, at the Forestry Commission in Zimbabwe, to NGO and government officials in Indonesia; and others), on the software we have developed (in Zimbabwe, Indonesia, Cameroon, etc.); on criteria and indicators (India, Laos, Indonesia, South Africa, and more); on future scenarios (Bolivia, Zimbabwe). Between 1998 and 2002, ACM had yearly international steering committee meetings, and most countries had their own national steering committees that met at least twice a year.
ACM Research Site in Asia
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